Swimming, marketing, and the boring 99%

I swam Division 1 at Georgia Tech. These days I coach small business owners on their marketing. For a long time I didn't connect the two. Lately I can't stop noticing where they overlap.

This blog is where I'm going to think out loud about where my business goes next. There's no master plan. It's a weekly writing habit, and this is week 1.

Where they overlap

Both involve risk. In the pool, you step up on the block and put a time on the board in front of everyone. In marketing, you hit publish and wait to see if anyone cares. Either way, your name is on something before you know how it'll go.

Both depend on the basics. 1000s of yards each practice 6-10 times a week. In marketing, the basics are knowing why you post, who you're talking to, what you want to say, and where you show up. None of it is exciting. Everything else depends on it.

Both run on repetition. Speed comes from hundreds of ordinary practices over a season. A business gets known the same way, one ordinary post at a time, for months.

And both are common. Plenty of people swim. Plenty of people post about their business. You don't need a rare talent for either one. I find that comforting.

The 1% and the 99%

I've been reading a lot of Steve Magness and Oliver Burkeman, along with other writers on Substack and Instagram. A theme keeps coming up in their work: people put a lot of energy into the last 1% of performance and too little into the basic 99%, which mostly comes down to doing the same thing again.

In swimming, that 1% looked like fancy new suits and shaving the night before a big meet. In marketing, I hear it as questions. What's the best time of day to post? Which hashtags? Which AI tool? Usually from someone who has posted 3 times this year.

The 99% is less fun to talk about, so let's talk about it.

What the 99% looks like in the pool

In swimming, the 99% is a short list of things you do thousands of times. For me, a simple basic was finishing out a stroke. Push the water back as far as it could go and as hard as you could over and over again. Lengthen it. Don’t cut it short. Finish the entire stroke. Every time.

What the 99% looks like in marketing

Marketing has similarities. Do one thing really well over and over again. Post on social media. Send a newsletter. Do it well. Over and over again.

The math works the same way it does in the pool. If you post once a week, you write 52 first lines a year. Get a little better at first lines and 52 posts get a little better.

Getting a little better each time

None of these details is ever finished. A streamline can always be a little tighter. A first line can always be a little clearer. The goal is to keep getting better at them, week after week, for as long as you're doing the work.

A swimmer works on her stroke in practice, in the middle of a season, while she's still racing every weekend. You can do the same with your marketing. Your 40th first line will be better than your 1st, and you get to the 40th by writing the first 39.

So pick one detail at a time. This month, the first line of every post. Next month, your bio.

That's the 99%. Ordinary details, done again, a little better each time.

The part I worry about

Here's my hesitation with this comparison. Training is hard. 5am alarms, the yardage, the cold pool in January. If I tell a business owner that marketing has a lot in common with training for a sport, I might confirm the thing they already fear: that this is one more grind on top of running a business.

I don't want to make it sound like a grind. I also don't want to pretend it's effortless. Content marketing is work, and the repetition is most of the work. What I can say honestly is that it gets easier when it's the same work every week, at a size you can keep up.

I'm also not writing this from some place of perfect discipline. I've taken six-week breaks from my own social media. More than once.

Why I'm writing every week

I've journaled every night for over a year. I'm close to 1,300 days on Duolingo. I send a monthly newsletter. None of those started with a goal bigger than "do it again tomorrow."

That's the goal here too. One post a week. Some will be good. Some will be a record of what I was thinking on a Tuesday. If you're reading along, you'll get a look at who I am and how I think about this work. If nobody's reading yet, I still get the practice.

If I miss a week, I'll use the rule I give my clients, borrowed from James Clear: don't miss twice.

Week 1. Done.